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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29164908">The First Day</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/furrywing/pseuds/furrywing'>furrywing</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Miraculous Ladybug</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Identity Reveal, no beta we die like well you know, okay nathalie had to find out about the butterflies at some point right?</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 11:07:33</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>891</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29164908</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/furrywing/pseuds/furrywing</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>She’s gone.</p><p>Nathalie knows it as she opens the door.</p><p>After that, everything changes.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Gabriel Agreste | Papillon | Hawk Moth/Nathalie Sancoeur</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>14</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The First Day</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I love these two disasters.</p><p>Please be gentle. o.o ^^;;;;; I just thought, hey how might a Hawkmoth reveal with Nathalie go?</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>She’s gone.</p><p>Nathalie knows it as she opens the door.</p><p>The atelier is dark.</p><p>The house is silent.</p><p>The kitchen is like ice.</p><p>She can hear, distantly, Adrien’s despair. And feel, closely, Gabriel’s powerlessness as he sits with his son upstairs. All carries through the chill silence into the cavernous atrium.</p><p>She jumps when her co-worker touches her shoulder, and turns to face Adrien’s bodyguard. The man’s eyes are glassy, but he doesn’t cry. When Nathalie gives him a weak smile, she’s suddenly buried in him. So she hugs him and her hands can’t meet around his back and that’s the first thing to go senselessly through her head. Still she doesn’t allow herself to feel the moment. She listens to his uneven breath, and after a minute she pulls away and he let's her go. They smile. Squeeze hands.</p><p>Very quietly she finds her office, avoiding the empty atelier, and spends the morning cancelling Gabriel’s appointments. She gives him a week, because the company can not afford a month.</p><p>Hours after the sun has set, as midnight creeps closer, Nathalie leaves, alone, from a house heavy with grim silence.</p><p>Mechanically she takes off her clothes, dropping them on the floor, and sits under the shower with the water muffling her sobs and fog rising around her.</p><p>And fears every day will somehow be horrifically the same.</p><p> </p><p>***</p><p>It remains the same.</p><p> </p><p>***</p><p>Gabriel’s grief was tempered by denial and Nathalie said nothing. The second morning the front door was slammed in her face and she nearly fell backwards from shock, catching her tablet before it could smash on the marble. Gorille rushed forward lest she lose balance on the stairs and she stood with him, both startled, her glasses askew. Her bag and its contents were far less fortunate, scattered across the steps as she lost grip. Through the gate she caught a glimpse of reporters and was half inclined to not make obvious what had happened by collecting her things. In the end, Gorille made the decision for her and then brought her home. He walked her to the forth floor and took her hand.</p><p>"It'll be okay," he said.</p><p>Alone on her sofa, Gabriel's snapping circled in her head and she tried to push out everything he'd said. It's just heartbreak, she told herself. Gabriel's is anger. Yours is silence.</p><p>The groundskeeper called her an hour later. Gabriel had dismissed half his staff in a fit of what she began to think of as white noise fury and so nearly a week passed before she or anyone else could hug Adrien for the first time since it happened. Since Emilie was gone.</p><p>He’d dismissed Nathalie too of course. But the next day she'd simply slipped through the service doors to access her office and if Gabriel noticed then he said nothing. She continued to run what parts of the company he seemed temporarily incapable of handling and that she had access to. She tried to address his son’s needs through Gabriel’s absolute apathy. Through this she learned he’d told Adrien his mother had simply disappeared, but Gabriel was often tactless in how he spoke, not thinking about what it might imply to his son. So she let that go too.</p><p>At the end of the week when he finally acknowledged her presence, he didn’t apologize and she didn’t expect him to. They simply carried on as if the outburst hadn’t happened at all. Nathalie called back to work the people who were comfortable returning both inside the house and outside of it. For the sake of Adrien, his tutors, their cook, and the groundskeeper gratefully appeared the next day. They avoided Gabriel and were curt with him, yet kind and warm with his son, and that was all Nathalie cared about.</p><p>His brand’s employees were another matter. A Public Relations nightmare. After minimal effort (and having sat quietly through the rants of infuriated of ex-staff), she left that to the suitable department and washed her hands of it.</p><p>When a summer enduring a house of tense silence passed, she pressured Gabriel into putting Adrien in public school even as mysterious attacks on the citizens of Paris began to mount. Because among all the nightmares on Nathalie’s mind, corrupted supernatural butterflies and teenagers with magic managed to remain entirely abstract. And Adrien couldn’t be alone forever.</p><p>Now in the entrance to the atelier, Nathalie watched Gabriel gazing at the golden portrait on the wall. It was two in the afternoon and he hadn't heard her enter, lost in Emilie's universe again.</p><p>“Sir?”</p><p>“Yes, Nathalie?”</p><p>He was short, annoyed, and with a patronizing lilt in his voice, and she felt tension building under her skin, waiting for his mood to turn more volatile. He withdrew one hand from where it had been placed on the pattern of Emilie's dress. Covered in its hundred glittering eyes the portrait seemed to stare back at him one-hundred-fold and she shivered thinking of it.</p><p>“You have a meeting in an hour, sir. The car will be waiting.”</p><p>“Are you coming?” Gabriel asked, not looking at her. It was more an order than a question.</p><p>She wanted to say no. She didn’t want to be trapped with him in a vehicle when there was no need, when she had other work to do.</p><p>“Yes. Yes, of course.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>It begins.<br/>&lt;3</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
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